The recent climate change media event organized by the government of the Maldives reminded us of an exhibition mounted by a group of architects, designers and artists for EXPO.02 in Switzerland. Working under the collective name Waterproof, they imagined a(n) (im)possible scenario in which the water level in Switzerland has risen to 1400 meters (4600 feet), turning the landlocked, Alpine country into an island nation, its rocky peaks rising above a vast ocean.

If in the unlikely event that everyone becomes carbon negative, not just carbon neutral, tomorrow, climate change isn't likely to be reversed anytime soon. Before whatever historical climatic condition that was codified as the international goal is reached, countries will experience water and food shortages, hotter and wetter weather, habitat loss, perhaps even extinction. During this interim, how will countries cope logistically? They will be geographically transformed, but will they also (intentionally) mutate culturally, even biologically?

(Switzerland on stilts.)

(Switzerland not on stilts.)

(Fjords as the new national — i.e., sacred — landscape.)

(Hawaiiana as the new traditional costume.)

(From premier winter destination to the new Riviera. The rich and powerful will arrive at Davos for the annual World Economic Forum not in chartered jets and snowmobiles but in swanky yacht-palaces loaned to them by shipping oligarchs in exchange for back scratches.)

(With access to new local ingredients, a new national cuisine develops.)

(New mountain hamlets. Instead of against ice avalanches, the landscape is augmented with anti-tsunami protection structures.)

(The elite Swiss Navy SEALs.)

(Once seemingly landlocked forever, Switzerland emerges as a new naval superpower. Everyone will turn to them to patrol shipping lanes in pirate-infested seas, that is, if there is still a global trade to speak of when much of the world has presumably drowned.)

(Swiss engineering, which once conquered goat-strewn valleys and perforated mountains, is retasked to traverse maritime abysses.)

(Just as soon as the flood arrives, land reclamation begins. Switzerland is the new Netherlands.)

Alex, you should check out Stephen Baxter's novel Flood someday; it's not actually a bad book, in many ways... As Wikipedia phrases it, Flood "describes a near future world where deep submarine seismic activity leads to seabed fragmentation, and the opening of deep subterranean reservoirs of water, estimated to equal the current mass of the Arctic Ocean in bulk. Human civilisation is destroyed by the rising inundation, which even covers Mount Everest in 2052, submerging all landmasses on Earth, although the human species has survived." It's a pretty memorable book, to be honest. I should be posting about it on BLDGBLOG soon.

Anonymous

October 20, 2009 at 8:14:00 PM CDT

I could be missing something here but what's formaldehyde (CH2O) got to do with Switzerland?

Where did you dig this out? I very well remember the exhibition at the expo 02. There was also a booklet to go with it, think it was exhibitedas part of the pavillion put together by the Hochparter one of the Swiss Architecture and Design magazines.